


The Breath Remains

by Elleth



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Family, Gen, Haunting, Protective Siblings, ToT: Monster Mash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-25 23:17:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12543476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elleth/pseuds/Elleth
Summary: A reminder of Tuuri turns out to be more than Taru bargained for.





	The Breath Remains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Minutia_R](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/gifts).



> You asked for Taru, so here's a Taru! ^^ <3

Taru's reflexes still were quick enough to duck out of the way of the breath mask that Onni hurled at her face. 

It clattered harmlessly and hollow-sounding onto the metal deck of the V/S Þór, and Taru could not help picking it up, all under Onni's sharp-eyed scrutiny. Siv had been the one keeping up the mood during the long wait while the crew tracked to the coast, and Taru had at least held her tongue. It was bad enough that Trond was projecting his own issues onto Onni - strokes and walking out into the snow, being unfit for duty - it was almost a relief to see him this alive again, with a bristling, icy energy that raised the hair on the back of her neck, rather than the listless stupor he'd fallen into in Mora. At the time she'd put it up to the loss of contact and whatever magic he'd done that had sent him into his coma. 

She'd been wrong. 

Seeing him returned to his old self again was the last straw, even after picking up the team one member short, that convinced her that Tuuri was dead. She turned the mask over in her hands.

"You knew all along," she said to him. It wasn't worth phrasing it as a question. "Onni. I am sorry." 

"Take it," he said simply. "As a reminder. Don't you _dare_ forget my sister. I hope it haunts you, so I don't have to." 

*

Taru woke with a start. She'd been dreaming of a particularly disastrous campaign, the last before she'd quit her strategist career to pursue something with a lower death toll and more publicity and profit, and in the flickering dark of her ship cabin she could almost still see the troll's claw shearing through her tent's fabric. 

Enough. _Enough._

She shook the memory off and reached for the bedside light, but her fingers found the faceplate of Tuuri's mask instead - even half out of sleep there was no mistaking it. Or the moisture under her fingertips, the cold that came from the absence of someone's breath where it should have been. 

Was it possible? Taru pulled her hand away, landed on the lightswitch, and turned on the bedside light that'd been mounted to the little table. In the wash of light, the last of the cabin's shadows dispersed, making way for nothing suspicious at all. The little cot in the wall, the fold-down desk holding a few mission papers she'd worked on before sleeping, the locker that held her clothes and belongings, the wash basin. The door was closed; she'd slid home the bolt before sleeping. 

On the bedside table, the breath-mask, the marks of Taru's hands on the misted-over glass. 

She was as rational as any other person - more so than most, Taru liked to say of herself. Being intimately familiar with the capacities of mages did not mean she believed any more than she had to - no one would put down any common soldier's skill with a gun or the stamina of a scout down to any more than innate ability, and as far as she was concerned, mages were not much different, even if they dealt with forces beyond the usual human experience. 

Nonetheless Onni's words rang loud over the clunking of the ship's engine somewhere below her. 

_I hope it haunts you so I don't have to._

Taru kept the light burning through the night, and worked on the expedition papers instead of sleeping. 

* 

"Onni." 

Taru knew how to use Icelandic paranoia to her best advantage. All it'd taken was to claim that Onni had handled a potentially compromised piece of expedition equipment - made doubtful by the time that had elapsed since Tuuri's death, but the mask had come straight out of the Silent World, from the hands of Captain Eide to Onni's, and that was enough. Onni could only glare at her from behind the thick, rune-carved glass of his quarantine cell. Taru had been promised that the runes made an escape impossible. 

"Onni," she said again, when he showed no reaction to her first call through the intercom. "This is for your own good and for mine. Keep a hold of yourself; you know what is done to mages that turn _kade_. Losses are a fact of life. You do not want to make the same mistake."

Onni made no move to answer her, but he deflated notably, stalked to the back of the cell, and threw himself down on his cot, crossing his arms over his chest. 

Taru turned to the young officer beside her, who watched with a bemused expression on her face. "Thank you," she said, returning from Finnish to Icelandic. "You have been very helpful. He is obviously unhappy to be quarantined - it isn't his favourite experience, but if he causes any problems, call me and I will try talking sense into him."

"Certainly, ma'am," the officer said, and gave Taru a smile. "My brother is the one who stowed away on your expedition, and your people brought him home safe; my family owes yours. Thank you for your diligence." 

Taru smiled back, but kept her thoughts to herself. She'd not approached Hildur Árnadóttir by accident, but if Onni insisted on causing problems, she was not going to take it without measures of her own to save the poor fool from himself. 

* 

The breath-mask - which, after a thorough decontamination, Taru had been allowed to keep - lay in the middle of the floor when Taru entered her cabin, but with Onni confined it might simply have been a swell of the sea that had thrown it around - this time. She picked it up, laid it in its former spot on the bedside table, and set to work. 

She pulled out a copy of Tuuri's book salvation list. Trond had already secured a buyer - a passionate Danish golfer and historian - for one of the looted books, and Taru crossed it off, when a knock on the door interrupted her musings of the profit the expedition might make if even the volumes that ostensibly were trash sold so well. She opened it to find Hildur, looking sheepish. 

"Ma'am, your mage asked for you." 

"Thank you," she said. "That was far quicker than I expected. Did he say why?" 

"He wants you to know that _he did not do it_ ; he was adamant on that, and that it would not stop if you kept him confined. Nor that he would help you if you let him out of quarantine. I am… honestly not sure of the point." 

"Huh. Well, thank you; I appreciate knowing that he is trying to play mind games with me."

Hildur frowned. "Is there anything he did that we should be concerned about? He's of course confined right now, but if there are safety concerns..." 

"No, no…" Taru glanced over her shoulder at the mask - again on her bedsi- no. It lay on her pillow now. She let a beat pass and noticed Hildur rising to her tiptoes to glance past Taru's bulk into the room, and moved her body out of the way. It looked innocuous enough to anyone who was unfamiliar with the context. 

"... no," Taru said, after a beat, after the surge of cold dread had abated. You see, he is the poor young man who lost his sister, and he is blaming us for recruiting her. He is desperate, not dangerous." 

"Well then," said Hildur. "I'll pass along that you got the message, and that should quiet him down?" 

"Yes, thank you," Taru said, and shut the door. 

If Onni was innocent of this - and somehow Taru did not doubt his claims - scruples wouldn't serve her. 

* 

The mask went down in the Atlantic shimmering with the reflected light off a wave before it was lost to sight. 

Taru breathed a sigh of relief that it'd gone quietly, murmured a runo - not that she believed it effected much, but it would not hurt - and made to turn back to her cabin - it was after sunset, the only light a red fading to purple and to grey in the clouds, and after a day of tedious desk-work that had strained her eyes, she looked forward to her rest. 

She almost expected to see the mask in her cabin again when she entered it, but nothing except her personal effects - a little scattered, likely by the roll and heave of the ship - were there. She went to bed relieved, with barely a stain on her conscience. If the mask had been haunted with some imprint, parts of her _henki_ , or whatever else remained of Tuuri, if there was anything left of her at all, should soon find the way to Tuonela where it belonged, or become a spirit of the place where the mask had gone under. 

She went to sleep easily.

Shrieking, close by her ear and thin as a mosquito's whirr, but louder, threw Taru out of sleep. Some physical force - a hand, there was a hand, a hand that was slimy with cold and wet - seized her ankle and hauled her from the bed. Her forehead struck the edge of the bedside table, and she felt more than she saw in the dark, a trickle of blood running stickily into her eye. 

"So he didn't have to! _So he didn't have to! **So he DIDN'T HAVE TO!**_ **"** came the shriek, and then cut off abruptly. As with a beat of wings, the presence vanished. 

Taru was alone. 

*

She came for Onni the next morning, laughing off the concerned question about the bandage above her eyebrow from Hildur, whom she found hanging around the quarantine section again, on the floor before her brother's cell, a book in her lap that she'd been reading from aloud. 

Onni regarded Taru with red-rimmed, hollow eyes and a terrible blankness of expression that went far beyond anything she'd seen during his stupor in Mora. 

"I would not have had to," he said. "But now that she is gone, I will."


End file.
